Category Archives: News

These indigenous Irish technology companies increased their turnover by an average of 30% last year and many are now looking outside of Ireland for their main market, according to a survey by AIB.

The survey found that despite a strong multinational presence in Ireland, there is a scaling indigenous technology sector worth €2 billion in annual sales and employs 30,000 across the country.

AIB’s head of Technology, Media & Telecoms Banking John O’Dwyer said there is accelerator movement incorporating players like Wayra, NovaUCD, the NDRC and others are playing a considerable role in attracting talent from overseas which is vital for business owners trying to grow a business in the ICT sector.

The feature had up until recently been held solely for some of the larger industry giants and political figures, the advice and blog section of LinkedIn has now been made available for all users to share their advice, opinions and ideas. The news of this was announced in a blog post and was suggested that is to rival Twitter; giving users the potential to publicize their brand through yet another medium, without the 140 character limit.

To give an example of how “exclusive” the influencers blog, released during October 2012 examples of some of the 150 people who used it involve Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Martha Stewart. As of now, 25.000 people will be catered for with this service – a number which will grow over the years.

As of the update, LinkedIn users can follow members outside of their existing network and use the new medium to build a new group of followers. The new medium enables them to also share photos, videos and presentations via SlideShare.

The service was initially launched in October 2012 covering a total of 150 people, but now the service will cater to an initial 25,000 people and will be expanded upon over the coming months and years.

“The valuable Influencer posts and the wide range of professional content from millions of publishers that we currently aggregate on LinkedIn are powerful, but only the tip of the iceberg. Combined, our members have extremely valuable and varied experiences; however, their knowledge and expertise has not yet been captured and shared.” – Ryan Roslansky, head of content development at LinkedIn

A large reasoning for making the influencer’s blog public was to attract a new, teenage, audience.

A second feature recently released by the business social network is the ability to block members from seeing your profile, posts and prevent them from messaging you. However, it is important to take into account other ways of hindering unwanted contact such as changing your security settings and disconnecting from people.

Despite YouTube visitors watching over six billion hours of videos each and every month split between over 800 million users, not all eyes are “real”. Many users purchase fake views which YouTube have said they intend to periodically check up on, validating views on videos to remove the frauds as not to deceive users.

“When some bad actors try to game the system by artificially inflating view counts, they’re not just misleading fans about the popularity of a video, they’re undermining one of YouTube’s most important and unique qualities,” Commented YouTube software engineer Philipp Pfeiffenberger. “While in the past we would scan views for spam immediately after they occurred, starting today we will periodically validate the video’s view count.”

“If you’re considering paying someone to increase your view count, you may want to think again. You probably won’t get what you paid for,” stated the blog post

“Views generated by some third-party businesses and services will not be counted on YouTube, and can lead to disciplinary action against your account, including removing your video or suspending your account.” In short, it is described as cheating and unnessacary.

Although initially established as a video sharing website, YouTube is now considered a search engine, and is currently the second most frequently visited search engine in the world, shadowing behind Google.

Wolfgang Digital, a company of self-proclaimed Digital Marketing “Nerds”, recently carried out a study which examined the click through rate (or CTR) of the variety ad-types on Facebook, The study has proven that the number of clicks on ads that appear on a user’s newsfeed is significantly higher than ads elsewhere and thus receive a higher level of engagement

Over a seven month campaign, beginning in June 2013 and ending in January 2014, the Wolfgang Digital team analysed three million Facebook Impressions through 24/7 campaign. In doing so, Wolfgang Digital successfully determined that the average CTR for a facebook display ad (those which appear on the right hand side of the screen, beside the friends list), was 0.4pc,which is around half the average CTR for display ads across the net.

Ads in users news feeds however, were shown to hold a CTR of 2.09 PTC making them 51 times more likely to be clicked on than facebook display ads. The tremendous CTR of News Feed Ads is close to the CTR seen in ads by Google AdWords

There are roughly 2.4 million people across Ireland alone, who use Facebook. However, despite the massive user base, ads on Facebook often don’t receive the desired attention. Wolfgang’s figures are similar to those concluded by a study from AdRoll, stating news feed ads were 49 times more likely to generate clicks than display ads.

Microsoft has added a new feature to its Office Web Apps in order to take some of the legwork out of formatting your documents. The new “tell me what to do” feature allows you to implement commands into Office that you previously may not have known how to find, by typing the command into a small search bar. Once you begin typing, Office will begin to display possible commands.

An example of this new function would be to type “double space” into the field. Once you type double space into the field, you are given a list of options including Line Spacing. From there, you can enter the line spacing tab and proceed as per usual.

The app is not currently available for the desktop version of office but it is likely Microsoft are just testing it online in order to receive user feedback and to beta its functionality. It would be safe to assume that this feature will be added to the desktop client of Office after positive user feedback and any issues have been debugged.

Other features possibly on the line to be added to Microsoft Office include an easier to access layout (possibly making this cool new feature redundant), an easier rendering of shapes, text boxes and images as well as a more simple way to access end notes and footnotes.